PJM Exclusive: Nixon Aide Chapin on the Worst Scandal Facing Obama

WASHINGTON — The former deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon and the first member of the White House team to resign as the Watergate scandal unfolded told PJ Media on Saturday that he believes the IRS targeting of conservative groups is President Obama’s greatest current scandal.

But Dwight Chapin said he does not think any one of the scandals on its own is enough to bring down Obama’s presidency.

“It’s fascinating some of the similarities, you know; the talk about Nixon having an era of criminality or whatever it might be in the Nixon White House, and at the same time now we’re wondering about this aura of prejudice against the Tea Party people and so forth — and whether or not that rhetoric from the very top of our leadership led to the possible actions by the way of IRS agents. And it’s a very similar situation,” Chapin said in an interview at the National Archives, where he spoke at a screening of the upcoming CNN Films documentary Our Nixon.

The film features footage pulled from more than 500 Super 8 reels shot by home movie buffs Chapin, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, and domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman — films that sat tucked away in the Archives after the Watergate investigation.

PJM ran through each of the Obama scandals with Chapin, who wasn’t yet 30 years old when he became President Nixon’s special assistant.

On Benghazi? “I guarantee you that on Benghazi had Richard Nixon been president he would have been down in that bomb shelter and working all night,” Chapin said.

On the seizing of AP phone records, he said “it’s not that they did it, it’s the size of the net.”

“They went after so much, and that’s versus if it were much more constricted it would have been more acceptable to the media and to the public,” said Chapin.

On the NSA wiretapping, Chapin cautiously said the jury is still out.

“I tend to favor whatever takes care of our national security and I do not have enough information to even make an intelligent, informed decision on that yet,” he said. “I think there’s so much more that we as the general public have to learn.”

Chapin called the IRS scandal “probably the most outrageous.”

“It’s entirely different than anything that Nixon was involved with with the IRS. Nobody went after anybody with the Nixon IRS. But in this one we know there was follow-through, we know that people — their programs were disrupted by the length of time it took to get approvals; some of them are still waiting for approvals from the IRS,” he said.

“It was an entirely different, much more devastating and much more corruptive of our elective process, in my opinion.”

And even though he quickly answered “no” when asked if any single scandal on its own was strong enough to take down the Obama White House, Chapin said so many scandals piling onto one another may have its own result.

“These things seem to be compounded by time — that’s what happened with Watergate,” he said. “This is the drip, drip, drip, drip. The biggest drip factor is probably the IRS thing.”

PJM also asked the onetime Nixon aide about Obama shuffling his second-term team to bring his confidantes into an even tighter circle around the Oval Office.

“I think that the drawing in of the loyalists is compounding the problem rather than solving the problem, that he needs to reach out, get some new thinking and to get broader thinking and to come up with more options and what he’s doing is constricting himself,” Chapin said. “And it’s not working.”

Referring to one part of the film showing the famous White House Easter egg roll, Chapin quipped in comments to the audience that “the head of the IRS was not there at that point” — in reference to former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman telling a congressional committee that the annual event could have been a reason he was at the White House more than 150 times.

The Our Nixon screening Saturday, part of the AFI Docs Film Festival, precedes the film’s public debut on CNN Aug. 1. A DVD release will follow in December.

On a panel discussion moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper after the National Archives premiere, Chapin said the film composed of the White House home movies, newsreel footage, and Nixon’s recordings of phone calls and meetings just represented a “little sliver” of those years.

“Whether that’s ‘our’ Nixon… is open to conjecture,” Chapin said on the panel that included the film’s director, Penny Lane.

“It doesn’t represent for me the whole presidency,” he continued, arguing it dismissed the contributions Nixon made to the country.

Nixon speechwriter Lee Huebner noted that “so often we want to make heroes or villains out of politicians.”

Lane said she was particularly interested in focusing on the Super 8 films of Chapin, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman to capture the “human toll” of Watergate.

The director, who was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” last year, vowed “we had honest to God zero agenda” in making the film, which was intended to be released for this year’s centennial of Nixon’s birth.

Chapin, though, disagreed with the filmmaker’s attempt to show two sides of Nixon through the archival footage.

“I really don’t know of two Nixons,” the former aide said. “…That does not represent to me the man that I knew.”

Chapin stepped down in 1973 after his college friend Donald Segretti was tied to the “dirty tricks” campaign. The following year, Chapin was convicted on charges that he lied to the grand jury and served nine months behind bars.

He described those years in the White House as fun with a presidential team that was constantly laughing about things — a spirit conveyed in their home movies included in Our Nixon.

As far as those secret audio recordings, “other presidents have the benefit of learning from Nixon,” Chapin said after the event. “They’re not gonna do it.”

“I liked it better today than the first time I saw it,” he added of the film. “Especially the music; ['Nixon Now'] was the best campaign song ever written.”

Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
She is an NPR contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

In the world of General Tso Tso sending an Ambassador to a country teeming with jihadists and failing to provide adequate security and then denying requests for more security, followed by standing down during a lengthy attack - and then topping the whole sordid thing off with a flood of lies to cover up the incompetence and cowardice - isn't a scandal.

The dereliction of duty over Benghazi has already been sanitized and concealed enough to trivialize it?

How much more heinous could it be where some of the most honorable agents of your military, knowingly outnumbered, supposedly defy orders, offer and lose their lives, to shield and protect their own diplomats and sovereign assets from fatal harm?There's a BIG difference between criminal negligence and premeditated corruption.But, when you have the highest ranking agents of your government affirmatively involved in both, you have unmitigated totalitarianism.Hard to believe there is yet another "authority" and article trying to dilute the severity of these HIGH CRIMES and violation of Oaths of Office.Bin Laden's not really dead; He's in the White House.

I had to laugh when I read the latest on Snowden. The administration is pressuring China to extradite him and warned that failure to do so would cast doubt on China's "commitment to the rule of law". LMAO

Coming from the most lawless administration EVER ... this was truly a gut-buster!!!!!!!! Snowden must have something on Obama ... and it must be HUGE!

I haven't read all thru these so if someone made this rather obvious point already, forgive me. I don't know what planet this guy is from but here on earth, there will be no dripping. The president is a Democrat.

All Obama needs to escape all damage is the passage of S744.And the GOP is stupid enough to give it to him. Call all senatorsMonday to try and stop the insanity of a 2000 page corrupt giveaway to those who came here illegally. link to phone numbershttp://www.theorator.com/senate.html

I completely disagree. The farrago of scandals works in Obama's favor: the public becomes confused and numb and the GOP overwhelmed. Which to investigate? Congressional investigators only have so much time and energy. As for the "drip, drip, drip," also not buying it. The media controls the faucet, and the dripping has almost stopped altogether on the IRS and Benghazi scandals.

No, Obama walks on all of these. He may not come out smelling like roses, but what does he care. Perversely, he even gains a certain added street cred in Washington for his use of power and for getting away with it. Exhibit #1: the immigration reform bill. Establishment Republicans are tripping over themselves to get it passed.

Enough with this Obama just needs to be more open about the scandals nonsense: 157 visits to the WH by the acting IRS commissioner and 307 by his deputy add up to O or people close to him being intimately involved in this up to their necks. And who in their right mind believes that even VJ would have done something like this without her bosses’ permission?

I have been feeling the same thing as Chapin. The IRS is the scandal that undermines the very foundations of government the way Nixon did. You don't burgle the opposition and you don't use the taxation arm of government on your political opposition either. I believe this is actually deeper than the violation of the constitution involved in the NSA scandal. Other Anglo Saxon democracies like the UK or Australia don't have a 4th amendment and their governments have much more power in that area, but no government in either country could survive burglarizing or using their taxing authority on the opposition. Indeed the IRS scandal is the first time since Nixon that I felt a President has clearly crossed the line. I was equally unimpressed by the attempts to get Reagan and Clinton, but I agree with Chapin the IRS scandal will not bring down Obama. What it will do is, barring the unforeseen, guarantee that the Republicans will retain control of the house in 2014 and perhaps make significant gains in the Senate.

The dereliction of duty over Benghazi has already been sanitized and concealed enough to trivialize it?

How much more heinous could it be where some of the most honorable agents of your military, knowingly outnumbered, supposedly defy orders, offer and lose their lives, to shield and protect their own diplomats and sovereign assets from fatal harm?There's a BIG difference between criminal negligence and premeditated corruption.But, when you have the highest ranking agents of your government affirmatively involved in both, you have unmitigated totalitarianism.Hard to believe there is yet another "authority" and article trying to dilute the severity of these HIGH CRIMES and violation of Oaths of Office.Bin Laden's not really dead; He's in the White House.

It is possible that this thing is going to get out of control. I don't believe that the administration understands what that could mean. Continuing to ignore the situation will not help the stabilize anything. And yes...drip...drip...drip!